Whistle-Blowing from the Perspective of General Strain Theory

ABSTRACT

Authorities in many countries rely on whistle-blowing systems to boost control of organizational deviance. It can hardly be answered whether this practice is legitimate and efficient without knowing the patterns of whistle-blower behavior. So far, little is known about the development process as an interaction of specific individual, organizational, and situational conditions that spawns especially external reports. This article reconstructs such typical progressions based on interviews with whistle-blowers in Germany and from the perspective of the General Strain Theory. It turns out that external whistle-blowing is often the result of an escalating conflict that can be interpreted as a very personal experience of strain.

Notes

¹ These insiders can also include customers or suppliers (Jubb 1999). Miceli et al. (2014:73) refer to persons with a “non-member status” outside the organization as “bell-ringers”.

² In Europe, for example, the Competition and Markets Authority (2014) offers financial incentives.

³ On the debate with respect to the National Health Service, see Pyper (2016); Ashton (2015).

⁴ Only a small portion of offenses that become known in the companies are detected through internal whistle-blowing systems. In a survey of German companies performed by KPMG, this portion was between 16% and 28% in the period from 2006 to 2016 (KPMG 2012, 2016).

⁵ See Savage and Hyde (2015): 16 different U.K. supervisory authorities have had 2 to 3157 reports for the period from 2005 to 2010.

⁶ In the U.K., the cases where whistle-blowers request any form of protection (under labor law) are recorded for the PIDA. These numbers rose from 157 (1999/2000) to 2,744 (2010/2013) but recently dropped down to 2,212 (2013/2014) and 1,382 (2014/2015), see http://www.pcaw.org.uk/law-policy/a-guide-to-pida/pida-statistics (10/26/2017). These statistics do not specify the exact number of external reports behind this outcome.

⁷ Whistle-blowing research emphasizes the interaction of individual and context factors, e.g. Culiberg and Mihelič (2016); Miceli and Near (2005).

⁸ The frequency of cases in which members of the organization are penalized after an (internal/external) report by the leadership of the organization is empirically documented (Lubalin and Matheson 1999: 69.1%; Merit Systems and Board 2011: 36.2%; Public Concern at Work 2013: 33–50% of the cases; Rothschild and Miethe 1999: 64–69%; Smith and Brown 2008: 60%). But since it is open as to whether these penalties were legitimate, conclusions regarding the formal illegality of the report can be drawn with caution only.

⁹ According to more recent surveys, members of organizations who had reported wrongdoing internally or externally often report rejection and other informal punishment by their coworkers. See (Public Concern at Work (2013): 20%; Smith and Brown (2008): 30%; Lubalin and Matheson (1999): 31.9%; Rothschild and Miethe (1999): 69%).

¹⁰ The particularly high numbers in Norway (see Olsen 2014; Skivenes and Trygstad 2010) indicate that the reporting rates are influenced by legal and other framework conditions (on cultural differences in evaluating whistle-blowing, see Vandekerckhove et al. 2014).

¹¹ That external whistle-blowing frequently is considered deviant social behavior is also apparent from the fact that external reports will mostly be anonymous or confidential, if they occur at all. Many government contact points prepare for that and offer anonymous reporting channels, sometimes by involving private service providers, e.g. https://www.bkms-system.net/bkwebanon/report/clientInfo?cin=1at21 (10/26/2017).

¹² The interviews were held in German. The translation provided here is aimed at authentically converting the respective passages into their English equivalent.

¹³ The figures were created by the utilized recording device.

¹⁴ Very much as defined in the GST assumptions (Agnew 1992:71) the typically well-developed self-confidence of these people plays a role in their resistance to strain.

¹⁵ Since we primarily interviewed people who had decided to make a report, the unobtrusive and the avoiding types were inevitably underrepresented. But overall they should make up the majority of the population (see 3.b. above).

¹⁶ Regardless of that, skepticism was predominant for normative reasons. There was fear of abuse and damage to the reputation of “honest whistle-blowers”.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded from 2011 to 2014 by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

Notes on contributors

Ralf Kölbel

Ralf Koelbel holds a chair of Criminal Law and Criminology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. His areas of specialization and research include deviant behavior, sociology of (corporate) crime, and the intersection of penal law and criminology. He is the author of various related publications, e.g. in the Routledge Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime in Europe and the International Handbook of violence research. Among others, his research projects empirically approach Whistle-blowing and the control effect of Compliance-Management-Systems on corporate crimes in the pharmaceutical industry.

Nico Herold

Nico Herold is a Research Assistant at the Faculty of Law at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. His PhD thesis addresses the decisions of whistle-blowers and provides two new descriptive models. His current research activities include the effectiveness of Compliance-Management-Systems and corporate crimes in the pharmaceutical industry.